“Well, we can’t get any sleep outside,” the wives countered. The seventh day, the wives took their woven ropes with them when they went to dig the onions. One wife carried along her baby daughter. They scaled the large rock beside their village and turned their faces to the sinking crimson sun.
“Let’s leave our husbands,” one wife suggested. “I don’t want to live with mine anymore.” The wives all agreed. The oldest wife stood on the boulder and chanted a magical word. She tossed her rope into the sky, and it hooked over a cloud so that the ends hung down. The other wives tied their own ropes to the one that was swinging and then they stood on the frayed edges of the ropes. Slowly they began to rise, swaying around like starlings. They moved in circles, passing each other, reaching higher and higher. The other villagers saw the wives ascending in the sky. “Come back!” the People called as the women floated over the camp. But the wives and the little girl kept going. When the husbands returned that night, they were hungry and lonely. They wished they had not driven their wives away. One of them got the idea to go after the women, using the same kind of magic they had. They ran to their lodges and brought their own ropes, and soon they too were rising in the night. The wives glanced down and saw the husbands coming after them. “Should we wait for them?” one woman asked calmly.
The others shouted and shook their heads. “No! They told us to leave. We won’t let them catch us.” They danced and swung on their ropes. “We will be happier in the sky.” When the husbands were close enough to hear, the wives shouted for them to stop, and the men stayed right where they were, a little behind their wives. So the women who loved onions stayed in Sky Country. They are still there, seven stars that we call the Pleiades. The faintest of all is the little girl. And the husbands, who will not go home until their wives do, remain a short distance away, six stars in the constellation Taurus. You can find them shining up at their wives, wishing maybe that things had turned out a different way.
—Monache Indian legend
CHAPTERTWENTY
IN the dark, beneath a pouch blessed with good medicine, Cassie told Will the story of her life. She talked the whole night. At times Will only watched her; at times he held her while she cried. And when her voice fell quiet, Will sighed and leaned back against his nearly new couch, painfully aware of the awkward and suffocating silence. Cassie sat now with her head bowed, her hands clasped between her knees.
Will could not have said how, but he’d known Cassie was going to show up on his doorstep. He’d known before she flattened her shirt against her stomach that she was pregnant. He’d known that it was up to him to spirit her away. What he could not understand was how, even now, she could worry about hurting Alex.
“I just have to leave for a little while,” she said abruptly, startling Will. She nodded slightly, as if she was still trying to convince herself.
“It’s the end of February now, and I’ll have the baby in August.”
“I could be wrong,” Will said carefully, his first words in hours, “but I don’t think Alex will just sit around for six months, waiting.”
Cassie turned her face up to his. “Whose side are you on?” she asked.
The problem was that Alex Rivers had the money and resources to find her anywhere. “What I need,” Cassie mused, “is a place where he’d never even think to look.”
And that was when Will understood why the spirits had brought Cassie to him at St. Sebastian’s, a week ago. He pictured the tar paper shacks that served as houses in Pine Ridge, the willow skeletons of sweat lodges that dotted the plains like the carcasses of mythical beasts.
Like everyone else, the government had basically forgotten about the Sioux; most Americans didn’t know living conditions like theirs still existed. For all intents and purposes, the reservation could have been on a different planet.
Will listened to the fragile hitch of Cassie’s breathing and turned her hand over in his, palm up, as if he could read her future. “I think,”
he said quietly, “I have just the spot you’re looking for.”
SO AFTER BEING IN LOS ANGELES FOR ALL OF TWO WEEKS, WILL FLYing Horse boarded a plane and headed to the place he hated more than anywhere else in the world.
When he arrived in Denver to make the connecting flight, his throat tightened up and his head spun. He was imagining, already, the red dust of the Pine Ridge Reservation; the vacant-eyed Lakota, who waited for their own lives to speed by them. He stared out the scratched window of the plane, knowing it would be at least an hour, but still expecting to see the sharp, rocky needles of the Black Hills. He pictured them ripping through the belly of the little plane, scattering gray and wine-red luggage.
Beside him, Cassie was asleep. He wanted to wake her up, just to remind himself why exactly he had come full circle when he’d been running in such a fixed line. But she’d had so little rest the night before that the skin beneath her eyes was blue-bruised. He envied her—not her exhaustion, and certainly not her life, but her ability to look at this trip as a fresh start instead of a foot-dragging trudge backward.
He would get her set with his grandparents, but that was where his obligation ended. He’d go back to L.A. and pick up where he’d left off:
days filled with traffic detail and speeding violations, and stifling, quiet nights. He could make detective in another year, and if he got out more with the guys, he could find some leggy young thing to stretch across the other half of his bed.
The truth was that he did not understand his newly adopted city.
He couldn’t remember the LAPD’s special rules about arresting politicians or celebrities. He didn’t know what to say in bars when flawless women told him they read crystals, or were on the water diet. His breath caught every time he merged on the freeway and saw a rolling carpet of cars, more people concentrated in one steel knot than in the entire town where he’d grown up. But regardless of what he cared to admit to himself, this is what he would tell the Lakota people he saw during the weekend:Life’s great out there; I’m on the fast track; I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
In her sleep, Cassie’s head lolled to the right, coming to rest on his shoulder. She restlessly crossed her arms over her abdomen, protecting her child.
Now,thatwas something Will could understand. Not the egoserving me-first attitude of Los Angeles, but the concept of extended family. Hell, his own parents had died, but there had always been people to look after him, even if it meant giving up something in their own lives.
Will breathed in the honey of Cassie’s hair, shocked by the smell of his own shampoo. He rested his cheek against the curls, calmed by the awesome responsibility of being her deliverance.
DURING THE EIGHTY-ONE YEARS HE HAD BEEN ALIVE, CYRUS FLYING Horse had made and put up fence posts, taken care of cattle, dug potatoes, ridden broncos for prize money. He had been a rodeo clown, he had repaired roads, he had exterminated rattlesnakes. Up until three years ago he had been working at a factory that manufactured fishing hooks, but now he just fashioned hooks for the hell of it; he was technically retired, which as far as he could tell only meant there was never enough to make ends meet. And this was even with Dorothea working three days a week in town at the cafeteria. She brought home minimum wages, a perfume mixed of grease and labor, and the leftover fish sticks and meatball subs. But Cyrus worried more about filling up his day with activity than about a lack of money. He had relatives, and that was the Lakota way—you took care of your own, even if you barely had a pot to piss in.
He sat on a stump outside his government-built house, the wood having softened to his bottom after all this time. The snow was melting;
it was still cold, but nice enough for you to forget winter if you stayed long enough in the sun. Today, he was doing a crossword puzzle. It was not exactly a mental challenge; he’d gotten it from Arthur Two Birds, who had erased all his pencil answers, so even when Cyrus got stuck he could take out his bifocals and peek at the shadows of the words that wouldn’t come.
His face was lined, like the craggy landscape of the Badlands, the otherworldly patches of the Black Hills where, as a child, he had believed evil spirits lived. Of course, he knew now that evil did not seat itself in rocks. Instead it seeped into people, becoming as distinctive a part of them as their scent or their fingerprints. Had he not seen it in the glittering blue eyes of thewasicuη clerk at the BIA? In the tired mouth of the banker who had repossessed the first truck he’d ever bought? In the dazed, drunken glow of the traveling salesman whose careening car had killed his only son a hundred years ago?
